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The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland
Welcome to Iceland, a very small nation with a very large number (two hundred and sixty five) of (mostly) very small museums.
Founded in the backyards of houses, begun as jokes or bets or memorials to lost friends, these museums tell the story of an enchanted island where bridges arrived only at the beginning of the 20th century, and waterproof shoes only with the second world war. A nation formerly dirt poor, then staggeringly rich, and now building its way to affluence once again. A nation where, in the remote and wild places, you might encounter still a shore laddie, a sorcerer or a ghost.
From Reykjavik's renowned Phallological Museum to a house of stones on the eastern coast; from the curious monsters which roam the remote shores of Bildudalur to a museum of whales which proves impossible to find, here is an enchanted story of obsession, curation, and the peculiar magic of this isolated island.
Founded in the backyards of houses, begun as jokes or bets or memorials to lost friends, these museums tell the story of an enchanted island where bridges arrived only at the beginning of the 20th century, and waterproof shoes only with the second world war. A nation formerly dirt poor, then staggeringly rich, and now building its way to affluence once again. A nation where, in the remote and wild places, you might encounter still a shore laddie, a sorcerer or a ghost.
From Reykjavik's renowned Phallological Museum to a house of stones on the eastern coast; from the curious monsters which roam the remote shores of Bildudalur to a museum of whales which proves impossible to find, here is an enchanted story of obsession, curation, and the peculiar magic of this isolated island.
252 pages, Hardcover
First published May 12, 2020
85 people are currently reading
2209 people want to read
About the author
A. Kendra Greene
6 books46 followersA. Kendra Greene vaccinated wild boars in Chile, taught English in Korea, and started her museum career adhering text to the wall one letter at a time. She has an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and is currently the Writer in Residence at the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 173 reviews
June 10, 2020
I wanted to like this book. I really did. It combines great passions of mine such as Iceland, museums, sea creatures, and I probably built too much expectation about the whole content.
The book is odd, rather than about museums, it’s more about the story behind the people who created them, which would be wonderful per se, if only it had an engaging narrative. More often than not, the writing is intricate and non-cohesive, sometimes too technical with unexplained terms about fish or birds in the middle of personal accounts of the museum founders.
The writing style relies a lot on short sentences. A lot. Like this. It’s annoying. It’s not Instagram! It’s supposed to be a book. The recurrence to this writing style makes it seems like the author tried too hard to make it cool. Except it didn’t.
I also found the illustrations of little to no help throughout the book. Mostly flowers/leaves/twigs, with a few exceptions of other obvious objects, but nothing on the displays or more detailed pieces from the museums to spark curiosity.
Of course there were interesting parts, to which I credit the 2 stars. I managed to highlight a paragraph here and there with some interesting facts or curiosities about the history&geography of the country or about the animals. I can say learned a few things with this book, but so much less than what I hoped.
The book is odd, rather than about museums, it’s more about the story behind the people who created them, which would be wonderful per se, if only it had an engaging narrative. More often than not, the writing is intricate and non-cohesive, sometimes too technical with unexplained terms about fish or birds in the middle of personal accounts of the museum founders.
The writing style relies a lot on short sentences. A lot. Like this. It’s annoying. It’s not Instagram! It’s supposed to be a book. The recurrence to this writing style makes it seems like the author tried too hard to make it cool. Except it didn’t.
I also found the illustrations of little to no help throughout the book. Mostly flowers/leaves/twigs, with a few exceptions of other obvious objects, but nothing on the displays or more detailed pieces from the museums to spark curiosity.
Of course there were interesting parts, to which I credit the 2 stars. I managed to highlight a paragraph here and there with some interesting facts or curiosities about the history&geography of the country or about the animals. I can say learned a few things with this book, but so much less than what I hoped.
June 13, 2020
In many ways “The Museum of Whales You Will Never See” is a love letter to Iceland, its people, its culture and folklore, its natural history, its flora and fauna, and its curious and quite unusual museums and public collections looked after by interesting personalities, with some care taking spanning generations. I thoroughly enjoy visiting museums of all kinds, so it is not surprising I found this delightful - especially in times when armchair travels are mandatory. The writing was superb and Greene’s audio narration was engaging. The uniqueness was refreshing and while I have not had the pleasure of visiting Iceland yet, this book has just bumped it up on my need-to-tavel-to list.
unfinished
July 27, 2024This sounded quirky and fun, but it turns out it was too niche for me. I read the first two “Galleries” (78 pp.) about the Icelandic Phallological Museum and one woman’s stone collection. Another writer might have used a penis museum as an excuse for lots of cheap laughs, but Greene doesn’t succumb. Still, “no matter how erudite or innocent you imagine yourself to be, you will discover that everything is funnier when you talk about a penis museum. … It’s not salacious. It’s not even funny, except that the joke is on you.” I think I might have preferred a zany Sarah Vowell approach to the material.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
September 14, 2020
I started reading this book in order to answer two questions --is it the whales or the museums that I will never see, and is the title intentionally intriguing or unintentionally misleading? It turns out that that Ms. Greene is a master of posing intriguing questions and of providing indirect and tantalizing answers.
She does not start you off with missing whales or missing whale museums, but with the Icelandic Phallological Museum. That is, after a couple of unfinished shaggy dog stories, the IPM is the first museum you are introduced to, and if you weren't intrigued already, certainly phallology is a topic that almost everyone will be able to think of some questions about.
As it happens, Ms. Greene is a curator of and expert on museums, so before getting to the obvious phallological questions you or I would ask, she explores why anyone would have the idea to start such a museum, and how on earth would one start collecting specimens?
Moving along, what are your thoughts about stones? Not gems, not mineral samples, not carved stones; just stones that a dedicated collector saw lying around and collected, just because she thought they were interesting. And now a favorite stop on a bus tour of Iceland is this woman's house and her surrounding yard, where thousands of these stones are on display.
Oh, you will get to the whales and the question of what is disappearing. But along the way you are going to wander through a forest of questions you have never given much thought to -- what makes something a museum? how does a museum start? what is a museum for? how does a museum differ from a collection? what should go into a museum and what is not worthy of a museum?
And at the end of this museum tour, your mind will not quite work the way it did before.
She does not start you off with missing whales or missing whale museums, but with the Icelandic Phallological Museum. That is, after a couple of unfinished shaggy dog stories, the IPM is the first museum you are introduced to, and if you weren't intrigued already, certainly phallology is a topic that almost everyone will be able to think of some questions about.
As it happens, Ms. Greene is a curator of and expert on museums, so before getting to the obvious phallological questions you or I would ask, she explores why anyone would have the idea to start such a museum, and how on earth would one start collecting specimens?
Moving along, what are your thoughts about stones? Not gems, not mineral samples, not carved stones; just stones that a dedicated collector saw lying around and collected, just because she thought they were interesting. And now a favorite stop on a bus tour of Iceland is this woman's house and her surrounding yard, where thousands of these stones are on display.
Oh, you will get to the whales and the question of what is disappearing. But along the way you are going to wander through a forest of questions you have never given much thought to -- what makes something a museum? how does a museum start? what is a museum for? how does a museum differ from a collection? what should go into a museum and what is not worthy of a museum?
And at the end of this museum tour, your mind will not quite work the way it did before.
May 14, 2020
Fascinating content and gorgeous writing! So much artistry on every page. A really fun read.
January 21, 2021
Dipped in and out of this one. Some interesting bits but the author's constant use of repetitive sentence structure grated.
2.5 stars
2.5 stars
February 22, 2022
I have been highly intrigued by A. Kendra Greene’s non-fiction book, The Museum of Whales You will Never See: Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland, since I first spotted it on Goodreads. I love quirky non-fiction, and I’m (borderline-) obsessed with Iceland, so I thought this would be something I would thoroughly enjoy.
Iceland boasts almost 300 independent museums, ‘mostly very small’, and the majority of which have sprung up since the 1990s. Some of them are set up in people’s gardens; some came into existence on the back of ‘jokes and bets’. Amongst other places, Greene visits ‘a house filled with stones’, and a ‘museum of whales that proves impossible to find’. Her exploration of Iceland’s museums takes her all over the country, from the far more populous south, to barren regions of the north. In her introductory chapter, Greene sets out that she has decided to focus her book on Iceland because she has ‘never known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.’
I was lucky enough to go to Iceland with my boyfriend in 2016, and visited one of the museums which Greene talks about – the Phallological Museum in the capital Reykjavík. Whilst there, I was mildly embarrassed about being surrounded by phalluses, and there exists a very awkward photograph of me standing beside an enormous whale penis, which my boyfriend insisted upon. Regardless, it was certainly an experience. Greene writes that this is ‘probably’ the only penis museum in the world.
I really enjoyed the structure of The Museums of Whales You Will Never See. The longer chapters, all of which focus on one individual museum, is either entitled ‘Gallery’ or ‘Cabinet’, and provides a small fragment of a meeting, or a curiosity discovered by the author. Each of these shorter sections refers to a separate museum, from ‘Gallery 3: Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors’, which relates to Sigurgeir’s Bird Museum, to ‘Gallery 5: The End of the World’, which details Iceland’s Herring Era Museum. The museums which she chooses here could be said to be more obscure, with unusual collections; these particular ones tend to largely be found outside of the capital city.
Throughout, Greene writes not just about how important museums are to society, but about the process of collecting itself: ‘We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things just to carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without.’ Written specifically about the bird museum, but surely applicable to all, Greene states: ‘And surely every museum is a museum of selection, a museum of choices made, but here the how of collecting seems not to matter. The source of a thing does not matter. It is the thing that matters in its own right. And that shouldn’t shock me, surely it shouldn’t, but when was collecting ever just about things?’ Of another museum, she goes on to write: ‘Never mind all the stuff that isn’t here, the things never made or never replaced for lack of resources, the things used and reused and repaired and repurposed and chipped and cracked and tattered and frayed and splintered and bruised and torn and scuffed and scrubbed and shattered and worn until gone. These are just the things we have that weren’t consumed or obliterated, a subset of the things we could possibly have, a subset of the things there were.’
The collections written about in The Museum of Whales You Will Never See are, of course, vast in their differences, and I appreciated this. She visits very niche collections, such as the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík, and the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum in Bíldudalur. Greene also includes the somewhat curious detail in that the majority of Icelandic museums displaying a polar bear specimen, despite the fact that polar bears have never roamed the country. Greene also writes – although sadly not at that much length – about the collections in all of the museums across Iceland which have helped to keep Icelandic history alive in the modern age.
Although undoubtedly interesting, I must admit that it did take me quite a while to get into some of these chapters, and Greene’s writing on the whole. The author tends to launch in at very random points, and everything unfolds quite slowly. A better approach for such a book, I think, would be to begin with details of her own visit, and then unfold the story of each individual collector. At the moment, this feels quite muddled, and a lot of important details which the reader needs to make sense of certain scenes are not revealed until a long way into the chapter. The Museum of Whales You Will Never See does feel a little piecemeal at times, as the author uses short vignettes to jump between quite a number of topics.
I did feel as though an opportunity had been missed here, with the brevity of some of Greene’s writing. She mentions a few museums in passing, sometimes not even detailing their names or locations. A list of everything mentioned has been included at the back of the book, but I feel as though anyone trying to use this as a guidebook of sorts, as Greene intends, would have to be comfortable doing quite a lot of legwork beforehand.
Although I did not love this as I hoped I would, I found The Museums of Whales You Will Never See quite fascinating. I really appreciated the concentration on just one country, and hope that Greene – or another author – replicates this idea in another locale. The book does have some shortcomings, where I did not feel that certain museums were given enough space, or detail, but I understand that an author of such a book would have to be more selective than they would perhaps like.
Iceland boasts almost 300 independent museums, ‘mostly very small’, and the majority of which have sprung up since the 1990s. Some of them are set up in people’s gardens; some came into existence on the back of ‘jokes and bets’. Amongst other places, Greene visits ‘a house filled with stones’, and a ‘museum of whales that proves impossible to find’. Her exploration of Iceland’s museums takes her all over the country, from the far more populous south, to barren regions of the north. In her introductory chapter, Greene sets out that she has decided to focus her book on Iceland because she has ‘never known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.’
I was lucky enough to go to Iceland with my boyfriend in 2016, and visited one of the museums which Greene talks about – the Phallological Museum in the capital Reykjavík. Whilst there, I was mildly embarrassed about being surrounded by phalluses, and there exists a very awkward photograph of me standing beside an enormous whale penis, which my boyfriend insisted upon. Regardless, it was certainly an experience. Greene writes that this is ‘probably’ the only penis museum in the world.
I really enjoyed the structure of The Museums of Whales You Will Never See. The longer chapters, all of which focus on one individual museum, is either entitled ‘Gallery’ or ‘Cabinet’, and provides a small fragment of a meeting, or a curiosity discovered by the author. Each of these shorter sections refers to a separate museum, from ‘Gallery 3: Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors’, which relates to Sigurgeir’s Bird Museum, to ‘Gallery 5: The End of the World’, which details Iceland’s Herring Era Museum. The museums which she chooses here could be said to be more obscure, with unusual collections; these particular ones tend to largely be found outside of the capital city.
Throughout, Greene writes not just about how important museums are to society, but about the process of collecting itself: ‘We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things just to carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without.’ Written specifically about the bird museum, but surely applicable to all, Greene states: ‘And surely every museum is a museum of selection, a museum of choices made, but here the how of collecting seems not to matter. The source of a thing does not matter. It is the thing that matters in its own right. And that shouldn’t shock me, surely it shouldn’t, but when was collecting ever just about things?’ Of another museum, she goes on to write: ‘Never mind all the stuff that isn’t here, the things never made or never replaced for lack of resources, the things used and reused and repaired and repurposed and chipped and cracked and tattered and frayed and splintered and bruised and torn and scuffed and scrubbed and shattered and worn until gone. These are just the things we have that weren’t consumed or obliterated, a subset of the things we could possibly have, a subset of the things there were.’
The collections written about in The Museum of Whales You Will Never See are, of course, vast in their differences, and I appreciated this. She visits very niche collections, such as the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík, and the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum in Bíldudalur. Greene also includes the somewhat curious detail in that the majority of Icelandic museums displaying a polar bear specimen, despite the fact that polar bears have never roamed the country. Greene also writes – although sadly not at that much length – about the collections in all of the museums across Iceland which have helped to keep Icelandic history alive in the modern age.
Although undoubtedly interesting, I must admit that it did take me quite a while to get into some of these chapters, and Greene’s writing on the whole. The author tends to launch in at very random points, and everything unfolds quite slowly. A better approach for such a book, I think, would be to begin with details of her own visit, and then unfold the story of each individual collector. At the moment, this feels quite muddled, and a lot of important details which the reader needs to make sense of certain scenes are not revealed until a long way into the chapter. The Museum of Whales You Will Never See does feel a little piecemeal at times, as the author uses short vignettes to jump between quite a number of topics.
I did feel as though an opportunity had been missed here, with the brevity of some of Greene’s writing. She mentions a few museums in passing, sometimes not even detailing their names or locations. A list of everything mentioned has been included at the back of the book, but I feel as though anyone trying to use this as a guidebook of sorts, as Greene intends, would have to be comfortable doing quite a lot of legwork beforehand.
Although I did not love this as I hoped I would, I found The Museums of Whales You Will Never See quite fascinating. I really appreciated the concentration on just one country, and hope that Greene – or another author – replicates this idea in another locale. The book does have some shortcomings, where I did not feel that certain museums were given enough space, or detail, but I understand that an author of such a book would have to be more selective than they would perhaps like.
November 17, 2020
This is a great little book about museums in Iceland, some of which are very unusual. The history behind these museums is also found here in this interesting informative guide to have if you are visiting Iceland, or want to know more about it. To stimulate your interest Iceland has, among others, a penis museum, a darkness museum, a ghost museum, a punk museum, plus a library of water. In all fairness there are other strange museums in the world including a hair museum in Turkey, an instant Ramen museum in Japan, and a bad art museum in Massachusetts, but Iceland may deserve a trip just to see their unusual museums. Just one warning; stay alert in the Ghost Museum!
April 29, 2020
Not a quick and easy read (all those Icelandic names!), but a beautiful one. It's an incredibly atmospheric piece of nonfiction chronicling the author's journeys around some of Iceland's many incredibly quirky museums.
August 18, 2020
Come for the information about potential places you could go when we're allowed out of the country again, stay for the beautiful writing and meditations on what it means to be a museum.
September 23, 2025
A lovely series of vignettes on Icelandic collections and collectors - what drives them, their stories, when and why a collection becomes a museum. All the sweeter for having been to several of the places the author portrays.
May 4, 2023
They were always generous with one another, their contribitions rewarded in honorifics from the nonexistent institution, until everyone of them was pronounced, at the very least, an upright member in good standing.
I now know of the existence of necropants, and they just might make an appearance in one of my D&D campaigns.
This is a peculiar and oddly beautiful book. A deep dive into an obscure subject, but less about the subject itself, and more about the stories of the people, the circumstances around the development of the museums, and a lot about the why.
March 4, 2022
This is an enchanting theme for a book, an arbitary meandering around Iceland taking in seven galleries and seven cabinets chosen from the staggering number of 265 museums in the country, considering a population of just over 300,000.
From the Icelandic Phallological Museum to the Museum of Witching and Sorcery, this is a delightfully unorthodox travel book.
A penis museum does have a appeal for some of the country's tourists, perhaps seeking some shelter from the weather. Its founder was given a pickled penis as a joke, and from the interest taken in it, realised there could be a business opportunity, and has since assembled a throng of distinctive members, each proudly mounted.
The Museum of Witching and Sorcery shows off the country's rich stack of folkore.
As in other good travel writing, the museums here are not the real point, but they suffice as a vehicle for Greene to describe affectionately the eccentric cast of curators dedicated to their curious outposts.
Rather than the usual tourist agenda, Greene sketches remote regions of the country with their appealingly offbeat dreamers and their various labours of love.
From the Icelandic Phallological Museum to the Museum of Witching and Sorcery, this is a delightfully unorthodox travel book.
A penis museum does have a appeal for some of the country's tourists, perhaps seeking some shelter from the weather. Its founder was given a pickled penis as a joke, and from the interest taken in it, realised there could be a business opportunity, and has since assembled a throng of distinctive members, each proudly mounted.
The Museum of Witching and Sorcery shows off the country's rich stack of folkore.
As in other good travel writing, the museums here are not the real point, but they suffice as a vehicle for Greene to describe affectionately the eccentric cast of curators dedicated to their curious outposts.
Rather than the usual tourist agenda, Greene sketches remote regions of the country with their appealingly offbeat dreamers and their various labours of love.
September 7, 2021
Quirky and a bit charming. Apparently, Icelanders love to create museums honoring their passions. The book tells the story of several of these small, unique museums and the people who created them. In my visit to Iceland, I didn't go into any of these museums, but I did still enjoy reading the book. It says more about Icelanders than the museums they have created.
June 22, 2024
This book was so cozy that it almost put me to sleep, but in a good way? It felt very gentle and thoughtful and sweet... which is a hilarious thing to say about a book that begins with a chapter on the Icelandic Phallological Museum.
May 20, 2022
Anyone who's been to Iceland, wants to go to Iceland, is curious about Iceland, knows someone in Iceland, or just loves wacky museums about penises and birds and sea monsters and driftwood and sorcery, should read this whimsically written gem...
I really did not expect to like this book so much. but every page is amazing, good fun. It's a rare skill to be able to bring museums (and the people around them) to life the way this book does.
I should mention it's also a beautifully formatted book. Tall and thin, with a lovely blue-green font and sketches throughout. Just a winner all around.
I really did not expect to like this book so much. but every page is amazing, good fun. It's a rare skill to be able to bring museums (and the people around them) to life the way this book does.
I should mention it's also a beautifully formatted book. Tall and thin, with a lovely blue-green font and sketches throughout. Just a winner all around.
February 25, 2022
"in a museum gift shop, how nice it is to know that there are so many things we do not need to own, that the bulk of their value is in knowing that they exist" - what a delicious sentence
September 22, 2020
I wanted to like this book so much more than I actually did. It's a great concept and there were some interesting stories... but I couldn't get past the writing style, which I found opaque and overly pretentious. A sample paragraph I bookmarked:
And another:
If you found these paragraphs evocative and compelling, this book is for you! If you found them slightly boring and/or irritating, give this book a pass, as I kind of wish I had.
Never mind all the stuff that isn't here, the things never made or never replaced for lack of resources, the things used and reused and repaired and repurposed and chipped and cracked and tattered and frayed and splintered and bruised and torn and scuffed and scrubbed and shattered and worn until gone. There are just the things we have that weren't consumed or obliterated, a subset of the things we could possibly have, a subset of the things there were.
And another:
...if your timing was right and you lived a long time, the math also allows that you might have seen all of it, rise to fall, a whole era encapsulated within the borders of your own long life. But generally, most people who experienced the Herring Era knew it as a diptych, a before and an after. It was only a question of ordering the feast and the famine.
If you found these paragraphs evocative and compelling, this book is for you! If you found them slightly boring and/or irritating, give this book a pass, as I kind of wish I had.
October 29, 2021
unforgivably indulgent. peopled with an interesting cast of real-life characters moving in and out of museums that I'd love to visit, but the tiresome writing style overwhelms the admitted abundance of Cool Iceland Tidbits. not an uninteresting read, but a real eyeroll throughout that you have to suffer through to get to the good stuff. I don't ordinarily mind a philosophical or contemplative bent, but greene's unending speculations were really a bridge too far.
I looked back through my bookmarks and it turns out that I was mostly interested in tales of Icelandic Hardship, lol:
I looked back through my bookmarks and it turns out that I was mostly interested in tales of Icelandic Hardship, lol:
[because they just plain couldn't grow enough grain to make bread,] the pope himself made dispensation that icelanders might make the body of christ from dried fish.
the danish authorities had, and not without reason, come to the conclusion that iceland was uninhabitable.
so radical was the change that some people sometimes poured a little water into their rubber boots, an intervention to make them feel right again. from the norsemen to the second world war, iceland lived in the middle ages. that’s how the icelanders say it.
June 3, 2020
An interesting selection of museums throughout Iceland. While I enjoyed the histories and descriptions of each of the museums, there were times where I felt like it went on a bit too long. All the museums are very interesting and Greene mentions that there was a boom in museums after the 1990s. I think I would have liked to see more museums even with just a little bit of information. Don't get me wrong, the museums that are chosen are very interesting and Greene gives us a detailed and well-written story of each museum's inception, it just would've been nice to read about a larger scope of museums throughout Iceland.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
May 19, 2020
Really good - a portrait of Iceland through its quirky museums - more literary nonfiction than guide.
September 26, 2020
Completely fascinating and now I want to spend weeks in Iceland doing nothing except going to museums.
October 12, 2021
I listened to this book after returning from a trip to Iceland, as I couldn’t get into reading it before I left. It felt like a bit of a spoiler before I traveled. Once I returned, I related to the book. Although I didn’t go to many of the places she mentioned, I appreciated the way she talked around not just the concepts of the museums but also encapsulating culture in museums of Iceland.
The audiobook as well read and contains many pronunciation of Icelandic words that would’ve been lost on me reading them with my eye only.
I especially like the end of the book where she discussed the crash of 2009 and how that did affect many of the collections and the subsequent tourism that has followed up to the current times in this pandemic world are extremely interesting to follow as well. This book Is a bit dated and many things have changed in Iceland since.
Her insights on what museums are could be and have been in the past contain many theories including oral history museums. she asks how you can exhibit or display an idea ?? which is often what is underneath a lot of museums. Taking the museum beyond the object even though there are strict definitions of what a museum can be —I think this book shows that Icelanders look for meaning in different ways.
The Sea monster museum founding chapter was most interesting to me as it showed the role story plays in culture, myth-making. Also relationships with the elderly carrying myths of the past and a willingness to think differently as they near death.
Written as a snapshot in time over the course of Iceland’s development of its mini folk museums, I found it intriguing and also a story of cultural evolution and the meaning making of the past present and future of a country such as Iceland.
The audiobook as well read and contains many pronunciation of Icelandic words that would’ve been lost on me reading them with my eye only.
I especially like the end of the book where she discussed the crash of 2009 and how that did affect many of the collections and the subsequent tourism that has followed up to the current times in this pandemic world are extremely interesting to follow as well. This book Is a bit dated and many things have changed in Iceland since.
Her insights on what museums are could be and have been in the past contain many theories including oral history museums. she asks how you can exhibit or display an idea ?? which is often what is underneath a lot of museums. Taking the museum beyond the object even though there are strict definitions of what a museum can be —I think this book shows that Icelanders look for meaning in different ways.
The Sea monster museum founding chapter was most interesting to me as it showed the role story plays in culture, myth-making. Also relationships with the elderly carrying myths of the past and a willingness to think differently as they near death.
Written as a snapshot in time over the course of Iceland’s development of its mini folk museums, I found it intriguing and also a story of cultural evolution and the meaning making of the past present and future of a country such as Iceland.
July 10, 2023
I was going to give this 2 stars because she BARELY talked about the whale skeletons (didn’t even talk about the Husavik whale museum which is why I read the book in the first place), but I don’t think that’s fair bc it genuinely was a cool book talking about Iceland museums and the people and stories behind them. I especially recommend this to fellow audiobook pals it was a nice listen and she is very thoughtful about museums and what they mean to us. And like now I really want to go to Iceland.
BUT I’m upset about the whale museum she didn’t get to go to and that I know nothing about it,,, after that part happened I was much less invested.
BUT I’m upset about the whale museum she didn’t get to go to and that I know nothing about it,,, after that part happened I was much less invested.
Read
August 19, 2020I was charmed by this book about Iceland’s most unusual museums. Across the volcanic rocky nation, A. Kendra Green takes us to the phallological museum, through collections of stories of mythical creatures and natural wonders and the mysteries of the human heart. I love people that make collections. in this collection of essays/travelogue, there is plenty for me to love. This extraordinary book becomes a museum itself at some point, curating the experiences and motives and stories of Icelandic curators themselves. I could listen to it four times in a row and find delight in it every time.
dnf
July 23, 2022i really wanted to love this but i ended up dnf’ing it at page 147.
i enjoyed the discussions on the first two museums but after that the more i read the less i cared. i found the writing to be a bit too flowery for my taste and it really started to give me Rupi Kaur vibes and that’s just not my cup of tea so yeah i DNF’d it :(
i enjoyed the discussions on the first two museums but after that the more i read the less i cared. i found the writing to be a bit too flowery for my taste and it really started to give me Rupi Kaur vibes and that’s just not my cup of tea so yeah i DNF’d it :(
January 20, 2024
This was creative and good, I thought. It was “artsier” writing than I usually read, and I mainly kept going because I’m trying to ready myself for a trip to Iceland. If I wasn’t going to Iceland, I’m not sure I would have finished this. But it was quite well written and is a good book.
July 26, 2025
1.5
I had high hopes for this book. My main issue with it was the writing style. In two words, it was pretentious and repetitive. Very little is said about the museums, the book is filled with the author's ramblings.
I had high hopes for this book. My main issue with it was the writing style. In two words, it was pretentious and repetitive. Very little is said about the museums, the book is filled with the author's ramblings.
August 15, 2021
One I'm very glad I took my time with. I absolutely loved it, but if you know me well, you're probably 0% surprised by this.
November 17, 2024
3.5 rounded up. Super interesting, but felt like it was trying to be a bit intentionally directionless at times and I've seen that tactic executed better.
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